could sleep for centuries
by Metonomia
Summary: The men that the Lady of the Green Kirtle created to serve her, and never let go of even in death. Written for the Narnia Exchange 2010.


The Green Lady sank her blood-magic deep into the rocks of Underland and created from them gnomes to do her bidding. "_Adam_," she breathed, and they were born in the harshness of her laughter, little men made of earth, to work the earth and to overcome it.

She knew what they knew, saw what they saw, and heard what they heard, and when the Warden spoke he could feel thousands of years of blood and magic rolling through his lifeless body. He was aware, with the amused detachment of his Lady, that he was not truly alive. The stone under the earth was dead and cold when she began molding her kingdom from it, and her servants were equally dead and cold. She gave them a history and imbued them with knowledge of their lot, to be excruciatingly aware of their slavery, to desire freedom yet devoid of any will to seek it. Into the minds of some she gave a false wisdom, the remembrance of Bism, from which they did not come, stories of edible rubies and drinkable gold, the taste of freedom. Through others she spoke of rebellion, of breaking away and returning home, and these she snapped the life from and crushed into dust.

They were her perfect minions, animated but empty. She filled them at her leisure, to mine more of themselves from the rock, to reflect her glee as she simultaneously dug her way to power and swelled the ranks of her army.

"What is the point," she asked herself through the Warden, "of so enabling them when they are nothing?"

"The fear," she responded, "and the devastation and pain, the sharpness of my words reflected across thousands of faces. The power."

The Warden was her favorite servant, the first-formed, the one grown most swiftly in the first rush of her magic into the deepest rocks. He was, she thought in his mind, the most her, sprung from the brightness of her blood and the inception of her plans, a moment of power to capture and hold. He was self-aware, but he had no self to be aware of except for the Lady - until the Prince came.

She recreated him, rubbed his skin raw with limestone and water and magic, stripped the words from his mouth with hers, and pressed herself into him until he awoke one day trembling and helpless. Years had gone by, she whispered, while he slept in poisoned fits, until she had pulled him back into existence. He relearned the world in her arms, at her breast and in her song.

"These are the sacred things," she told him, and he memorized the shape of them on her lips.

"Blood is the most holy of all," she murmured at night. She carved runes into their flesh, for life and health and protection, she said as she raised the knife from her own arm and brought it to his. She held them together and watched him tenderly as her blood boiled into his veins. Other nights she caught some of her blood in a goblet, mixed it with wine, and held it to his lips.

"Take this and drink it," she said with the voice of the earth, echoing through the rock and climbing through the depths of her Underland to reach him, and he sat in her halls and drank of her life, and Rilian knew he belonged to her as surely as did the stones she governed.

The Warden did not know what to do with this human man, who was as controlled by the Lady as any of the gnomes, but who was, after all, his own person. Many came down, and few returned to the sunlit lands, and none had ever stayed as the Prince did, guest and prisoner and consort and ultimately nothing more than one of the Lady's many tools. She directed the Warden to serve him, and through the Warden let show all her contempt and impatience for the Narnian prince, her hyper-awareness of him that in her own body was desire but in the Warden's could be more critical. The Warden relished the feeling, unique only to him, his Lady's and yet dependent upon his existence. He was the most trusted extension of herself, the most fully her, the one who spoke her words most often, the one most completely - even more than this exalted, destroyed Prince - her slave.

Yet Rilian drew him away from the Lady, forcing the Warden into personality and identity. He named the gnome – Mullugutherum – and the Lady accepted it through him, responding to the name and holding him to a pattern dependent upon the Prince. If Rilian saw the Warden as a peevish, overprotective servant, that was what he became. The Lady remained in control of him, he knew all too clearly, but suddenly that control came through the Prince, and at times the Warden caught himself reflecting upon the Lady's fear that the chains she had constructed would slip. A part of him that was almost really himself hoped for the day when the human vessel would no longer be necessary, and the Lady would be mistress only of her own creation.

The lady taught Rilian to be fearless, stronger than any man and sure of his own strength.

"I will show you how to be king," she said, and drew him into a wall of fire. "Do you trust me," she said, and it was never a question but he willingly answered as she commanded.

"With my life, my Queen." And when she led him through the depths of a lake, "with my last breath, my lady." And when she bound him to a silver chair each night, "with all my heart, my love."

He woke gasping for her, biting his lip through and tied to the chair, and she stroked the sweat from his brow, kissed the blood from his mouth, and sang softly to him. Nonsense - a child's lullaby, sleeping rock and still waters, and he lay his head on her lap and slept.

"What do you remember?" she asked him each morning, and he told her he knew nothing, but he remembered this: her lips, her eyes, her gentle cruel hands holding him as he raged against something he could not articulate.

"What is the nature of my sickness?" he asked her once, and her smile told him he had pleased her, had finally passed some long test.

"Your mother was murdered," she told him, strumming her lyre - for comfort, she often said. "She was struck by a great serpent which is the demon-pet of the Narnian king. It is sometimes a lion, and causes the Overlanders to worship it."

"Please, my lady," he asked, "what is a lion?"

"Why, like a little cat, but bigger, of course!" She giggled, birds and bells for a moment before casting sad eyes back at him.

"When the serpent-cat slew your mother you went out to hunt it, my brave knight, but it bit you, and you would have died but not for my art. I have healed you, but each night the sickness rises in you and you become as the serpent."

"How can I break this enchantment?" he begged her.

"When you have avenged your mother's death by taking the Overlands," she assured him, over and over. "When you have been made king over that land, then you will break the beast's power and your own sickness will be gone. Then," she said, the lyre's sweet notes mixing with a stronger and more distant harmony, the smoky scent that he knew as her lining his lungs, "I will be made your Queen, always beside you, teaching you and protecting you."

"When I conquer the Overlands," he repeated, a prayer and a promise. She smiled, a flashing of teeth in the darkness of his room, and straightened his collar, kissed his cheek, drew her nails down his back.

Mullugutherum – the traitorous knight's name, unattached to him in any true way, her weakening voice reminded him – watched silently as the kingdom crumbled and the Overlanders fled toward the exit into their too-bright world. His Lady's sense extended through the stone walls, directing the other gnomes as they fled and rejoiced and slowed down the Overlanders.

Crouching in the shadows, his pitted skin fitting right up against the rock, he felt the Lady's final enraged shriek ring in his mind at Golg's failure to ensnare the Narnian prince with her lies about Bism. She snapped the tie between her mind and Golg's form, and the Warden watched with her glee as the little gnome fell into the depths of Bism, nothing more than the rock from which he came, never able to reach the freedom he believed he had once known. The water lapped at the Warden's toes, but it was not a threat, not to the Lady. She had already died, and the Warden was vaguely with her own knowledge of magic that he should be free of her, or dead also. Her power should have disappeared when she was killed, but – and in the splashing of once-gnome rocks into the flood, he could hear her laughter – she held on to him. Her magic could not fully die until she let him go, and she could not let him go unless she lost all of her magic, and so he remained.

"_Adamah_," the Warden felt her flutter through his mind, using the only word she had ever given to him that she could not also claim, she who had not come from the man of the earth. And yet she had made man and earth her own. "_Adam_, _dam_, my earth and my blood. My body."

Soon the Underland fell silent but for the sweep of water, and the Warden drifted, half stone and half magic, his Lady's awareness slipping away. She had long cut all ties with the other gnomes, now crumbling rocks in the fires of Bism or lining the bottom of the engorged lake, and concentrated all of her remaining power in the Warden. He climbed from the water onto a shallow ledge and crouched there, unknowing but waiting, no mind left now that hers was gone, yet holding the Lady to the earth that was forever hers.

Rilian the Disenchanted was crowned a month after his father's funeral. He had walked among the people of Narnia in that time, learning the magic in the way they worked the land and searched the stars. He had listened to folk stories and grown tan. He had spoken to Aslan. Finally, sitting in the great hall of Cair Paravel long after the last courtiers had left, he rested a hand upon the empty throne next to his.

"When I have been made king over that land," he whispered. The taste of blood rose in his mouth, and when he paused in the silence of the night, he heard the echo of bells through the earth.


End file.
